Employers Employ People in their Own Image.

In running an HND unit in employability skills and team building recently we discussed the anomaly of  homogeneous teams being the norm as opposed to balanced teams or heterogeneous teams.

In Meredith Belbin's model a performing team is said to be best composed of different personalities and skill sets - diversity is the aim for a performing team. Why do we see so many teams that have the opposite. Corporate organisations often recruit on "team fit" which means people recruit in their own image or to fit in with what we have already.


There are all sorts of issues around this including some typical recruitment nightmares for job seekers. One trend seems to be if you haven't been doing the similar role in very recent times recruiting managers don't want to know.  Another is the "recruiting in your own image" where line managers view people like themselves and   consciously or subconsciously reject people on initial CV search that don't fit the norm or mould - i.e. they recruit existing industry players who work for big corporate organisations  like themselves, rejecting people from outside their industry or ex freelancers and contractors because they don't understand their backgrounds, lifestyles and CVs. What a missed opportunity this is for getting in some fresh ideas and approaches!

The result here is all sorts of anti diversity behaviours and in some cases quite discriminatory certainly from an ageism perspective let alone anything worse. This narrow approach isn't complementary to the Belbin approach is it?

So many ex-colleagues and associate consultants  tell us anecdotes of corporate short sightedness resulting in rejection at a very early stage of the exhausting recruitment process.

Most are older employees who said to us that they where told that they don't fit in with the team profile by recruiting managers in their thirties, or that their skills are not recent, even though most of these people held senior roles in these skill sets earlier in their careers with seriously success records behind them.

So is this naivety or is it  protectionism by younger managers worried about employing older workers or challenging individuals from outside the industry  who might perhaps know more or be in fact more competent than them?

The resulting insular and non performing teams in many of Britain's larger corporate organisations is a significant concern in any organisational design.

Taking Time To Think

What is the main barrier to business design?

At a recent delivery of  an in house Business Architecture course in Northampton in the UK delegates said " Not having time to think and be creative due to the pressures of delivery".

Thinking time and a culture that accepts it as a worthwhile pursuit is a really important factor in designing and doing the right business change programmes . Thinking time is work - trust me!

Design or Evolution

Most large corporate organisations are what they are. They evolve through: change acquisition merger and the purchase of customer portfolios. Business architecture seeks to change this by putting in place intelligent design; defining an end state based on an assessment of strategy and gaps from the "As Is".

If we step back a moment this is a bit like Darwinism versus Intelligent design; evolution seems to have worked well for biology in creating organisms that are highly adapted to the environment; most highly efficient and effective until a change brings extinction of a species.

So if evolution is good enough for life on earth why doesn't this work in business or does it?

The issue is that the larger corporate bodies are sheltered some what from environmental change due to their size and brand dominance and it only when a major change event that the "water level" is lowered and the "rocks" start to appear to "hole the hull".

The issue is also that over many years change was a bit steady and the survival pressures and survival of the fittest didn't hit too many larger companies. Until of course when major events like the banking crisis meant to extend the analogy here "an asteroid hit the planet" in late 2008 and caused a mass extinction.

SMEs seem to work better or more easily in a evolutionary environment but when you get bigger a future must be crafted and planned not just allocated to survival of the fittest and  business evolution based on Darwinism.

In business, intelligent design seems a much more sensible approach than sitting back and allowing fate to govern your future. So why do so many big companies just morph and evolve and effectively unknowingly "hope for the best"? -Answer- Do some business Architecture!

Balancing Compliance and the Media

In a world of financial difficulties the media looks to pillory and find those responsible. Regulation and compliance become the popular solution for all our ills. "If things had been regulated better" then this or that would n't have happened. Nearly every day the media is probing and acting like a pack of hunting hounds around one issue or another.

The trouble is that regulation cost money, lots of money. It is evident from contractor job boards that the majority of contracts on offer for change professionals in the UK this autumn are regulatory based compliance projects. Large corporate organisations are doing stuff because they have to, not because they really want or need to. Solvency 2, RDR (Retail Distribution Review) are two of the many regulatory based initiatives rippling through financial services. How much real customer service improvement has been put on hold as a result?

Who pays for all of this- the customer - in higher prices  and also perhaps more significantly in many cases, irritating processes and worsened customer experiences - yet another pointless pre recorded compliance based announcement delaying the call!

I am not advocating that compliance is bad news I am just saying that we need to be careful we "don't throw the baby out with the bath water". It isn't the panacea that the announcers and anchor men/ladies on the Today Programme would seem to suggest.

Compliance has an enormous cost in both hard cash and in how we interact with organisations we buy services from. What we really  need is a bit of balance and a bit of common sense.

Time to go Fishing!

We seem to arrived at that time of year where running a small business whose customers are mostly corporates becomes frustrating!

Loads of people are off taking their annual paid leave, managers aren't around to make decisions to release budget and generally it's " I will call you in September".

So, like Christmas, half terms and Easter it is yet another time that isn't particularly productive.

Annual leave is a serious productivity issue its not just the time off but it is the week before to wind down to finish off and the week after the holiday to read the 1000 or so e mails and to ramp back up again.

An ordinary two week holiday can wreck a month for some. When everyone is taking it and it's usually staggered to "provide cover", the whole place grinds to a halt for the best part of July and August. Funny really cause when I was a salary-man I took it all for granted too!

Oh, and take too long a holiday and its an opportunity for some politics at your detriment whilst you are away!

You can understand in the days before globalisation, well even before doing business outside your local area, meant that whole towns in the North of England closed for a recognised week as the whole workforce went on mass by "charrabang" to "Skeggy" or some where. Bit before my time though hasten to add! - I'm sure Orwell can give us some snippets!!

So perhaps it's best to join the "permies" and go and do some fishing!!